During the past decade, a number of free music players in Japan have fiercely, with no compromise, continued to grapple with the questions that lay at the heart of the solo saxophone recital: how to tease and tear new formations out of the interface between human breath, human flesh and skeleton, and the instrument itself, its keys, holes, pads, reed, and brass body.
With Free Wind Mood, An’archives splits one vinyl record down the middle, giving a side each to two of the most rigorous, exciting, and committed players from the scene: Harutaka Mochizuki and Makoto Kawashima.
While there are elements of their playing that places them in a history of Japanese free blowing, from Kaoru Abe through Masayoshi Urabe to now, they both have a singular voice: Harutaka more stringent and tart, Kawashima, perhaps, more melancholy. Tellingly, they’ve both intersected with rock music and free sound ensembles, with Kawashima working alongside Nishizawa Naoto of EXIAS-J (Experimental Improvisers’ Association of Japan), while Harutaka has worked in a duo Tomoyuki Aoki of psych-rock group Up-Tight, and guitarist Kondo Hideaki (also of EXIAS-J).
But both of them have made their most massive strides forward with their own solo releases, Kawashima’s potent Homo Sacer one of the final releases on PSF, and Harutaka’s Pas LP and Through The Glass CD exploring new terrain for the nexus of breath and brass. Moving on from those releases, Free Wind Mood is a devastating listening experience, blood and guts on the floor as the players fully inhabit the architecture of the space, and of the self, and play like their lives depend on it.
Jon Dale

Winter record, flowers and snowflakes. Here is the blue sky into which the breath evaporates and kisses the white clouds, the crystal voice and the brass notes will fall like a wet snow on a long gone time, something vanished and still…

The breathing of the voice and the alto sax, sonic calligraphies drawn onto the white page of silence, scratched by the strings of a melancholic lapsteel. Ascending curves and whirls, calling the storm out.

Something cries, an alto on the edge of the abyss, you don’t give up on what haunts you, it summons you, holds you at the end of a rope. Harutaka Mochizuki is almost asphyxiated, listen to him !

He plays sad phrases on this tombstone, this wall of noise. The deafening sound of tears and heart, all of this flowing into the estuary, the bell overflown by lean notes, chrysanthemum petals, shrillness, mufflings.

Then, a voice that seems to arise from other times, Fuji Yuki, floating ectoplasm in the whisper of dusk, taking our hand onto her heart, her song of infinite melancholy, her long black hair cloaking her, escaping from the soil that holds us back.

She floats, like a drowned Ophelia, like a female spirit winding towards a relieved melody. Bowed strings, a net of silk and rust wrapping around her voice, and faraway, clouds drift.

A distant banjo recalls the peat of existence. Was it you, these voices ? Sax will come back into the circle dance, the voice kills, tuning to the lapsteel in a broken mirror play, two soliloquies heard through a smog of sadness, with dusk calling us to merge with our shadows.